The Bookman's Wake (39 page)

Now the medics had it. I had to get away from there:
my guts were in turmoil.

I climbed the hill. The cabin rose up suddenly, the
lights still blazing. A woman stood in shadow at the
window.

Eleanor.

I clumped up the steps and walked in. One look at my
face and she knew. She cried and I held her and I looked
down the slope with its aura of death and its red lights
flashing.

In a while one of the medics came up the hill.
“They’re taking her off now,” he said.
“She’s awake and she wants to see
you.”

I asked him to sit with Eleanor while I climbed back
down the slope. Someone had covered Rigby with a blanket
and I stepped around him on my way to the copter. I got
inside and sat on the floor beside the cot where Trish
lay pale as death.

She didn’t say anything, just held my hand a
moment. “We gotta get moving,” the medic
said, and his eyes met mine and I knew what he meant. It
was touch and go.

“You boys ride her easy,” I said.
“She’s got a bigger heart than all of us put
together.”

I met the second medic coming down the hill. I stood
on the bluff and watched the copter rise slowly over the
woods. In the distance I could see police cars
coming.

I went into the cabin to look for Eleanor, but she was
gone.

I
was sitting in the precinct room on the perp’s side
of the table when I finally met Quintana. He came into
the room with a steaming cup in his hand, sat across from
me, and doled out the evil eye.

“You dumb fuck,” he said after a
while.

The coffee was for me. I drank it black, same as he
did.

They interrogated me for two hours. His partner, Stan
Mallory, brought in some Danish and we went till noon.
Twice during the questioning Quintana let me phone the
hospital, where nothing had changed.

At twelve-fifteen he said, “Let’s get out
of here.”

He seemed to be talking to me, so I followed him out
to the parking lot, where he shuffled me to the shotgun
side of a late-model Ford.

“This is supposed to be my day off,” he
said as he drove the wet streets.

I waited a moment, and when he didn’t follow his
thought, I said, “There aren’t any days off,
Quintana. Don’t you know that yet?”

He knew it. He was just about my age and going through
the same brand of burnout that had made my last year on
the job so restless.

“I hear you were a good cop,” he said.

“I was okay.”

“A damn good cop. That’s what they all
say. I made some calls.”

“I put a few assholes away.”

“I hate to see a cop take a fall. Especially a
good cop.”

He was up on the freeway now, heading north. But he
dropped off on the John Street ramp. We drove past the
Times
building, where the clock on the Fairview side said
quarter to three.

“We need to talk to Eleanor,” he said.

“You’ll never find her. She could be
anywhere by now.”

“You remember where you left her car?”

“I think so.”

“Show me.”

We went north, and after a bit of double-tracking I
found it. He opened the door and looked under the seat
and took out the
Raven
she had left there.

“What do you think, maybe she took this out to
compare it with the other one?” he said.

“I think that’s part of it. And some of
it’s just what she said. She just loved having
them.”

He touched the book with his fingertips.
“Isn’t that a lovely goddamn
thing.”

“Rigby was no slouch. They say Grayson was good,
but there ain’t no flies on this.”

We drove back downtown. A voice came through his
radio, telling us Miss Aandahl was out of surgery. Her
condition was guarded.

“I got a guy at the hospital keeping
tabs,” Quintana said. “We’ll know what
he knows as soon as he knows it. If I were you, I’d
get some sleep. Where’ve you been holed
up?”

I looked at him deadpan. “At the
Hilton.”

“You son of a bitch,” he said with a dry
laugh.

Surprisingly, I did sleep. Six hard hours after a hard
shower.

I came awake to a pounding on the door. It was
Quintana.

“I didn’t say die, Janeway, I said sleep.
Get your ass dressed.”

I asked what he’d heard from the hospital.

“She’s been upgraded to serious. No
visitors for at least three days, and she won’t be
climbing Mount Rainier for a while after that. But
it’s starting to look like she’ll live to
fight another day.”

He took me to dinner in a seafood place on the
waterfront. It was superb. He paid with a card.

We didn’t talk about the case. We talked about
him and me, two pretty good cops. He was going through
burnout, all right, it was written all over him. At
thirty-eight he was having serious second thoughts about
decisions he had made in his twenties. He had been a
boxer, a pretzel baker, a welder, a bodyguard, a
bartender, and, finally, at twenty-three, cop. He was
solidly Roman Catholic, a believer but unfortunately a
sinner. In his youth he had studied for the priesthood,
but he had repeatedly failed the test of celibacy. A guy
could go crazy trying to do a job like that. Now, after
spending a few hours with me, he was charmed by something
he’d never given a moment’s thought. Quintana
was the world’s next killer bookscout.

“This stuff is
just
goddamn fascinating,” he said.

“My world and welcome to it.” I
didn’t know if he’d make the literary
connection, so I helped him along. “That’s a
line from Thurber.”

“I know what it’s from. You think
I’m some wetback just crawled over the border?
Walter Mitty’s
from that book.”

“Good man.”

He had a leg up on the game already.

I asked if he had a first name.

“Shane,” he said, daring me not to like
it.

But I couldn’t play it straight. “Shane
Quintana
?”

“I see you come from the part of Anglo-town
where all brown babies gotta be named Jose.”

“Shane Quintana.”

“I was named after Alan Ladd. Kids today
don’t even know who the hell Alan Ladd was.”
He deepened the Chicano in his voice and said, “Ey,
man, Shane was one tough hombre, eh? He knock Jack
Palance’s dick down in the mud and stomp his gringo
ass.”

“I think it was the other way around. And Shane
was a gringo too.”

“Don’t fuck with Shane, Janeway. I can
still put you in jail.”

“That’s your big challenge in the book
world, Quintana.
Shane
. Find that baby and it gets you almost two
grand.”

We went to a place he knew and shot pool. Neither of
us would ever break a sweat on Minnesota Fats but we took
a heavy toll on each other. He had a beeper on his belt
but nobody called him. I could assume Trish was alive and
holding her own.

Late that night we ended up back downtown in the
precinct room. Mallory was still there, two-fingering
some paperwork through an old typewriter.

We sat and talked. Eventually Mallory asked the big
question.

“So what’re you gonna do?”

About me, he meant.

Quintana shrugged. “Talk to the chief. I dunno,
Stan, I don’t see where we’ve got much
evidence for a case against this man.”

Mallory gave him a you’ve-got-to-be-kidding
look.

“We’ll see what the chief says
tomorrow,” Quintana said.

In a little while Mallory left. Quintana said,
“If I get you out of this shit, it’ll be a
miracle. The Lady of Fatima couldn’t do
it.”

I followed him into an adjacent room. He sat at a
table with some video equipment. “I talked to Mrs.
Rigby today. You interested?”

“Sure I am.”

He popped a cassette into a machine and
Crystal’s haggard face came up on a screen.
“Most of this’s routine. Stuff you already
know. The kicker’s at the end.”

He hit a fast button and looked in his notebook for
the counter number where he wanted to stop it. “Her
problem was, they never had any money,” he said.
“They owned the property they lived on,
they’d bought it years ago before prices went out
of sight. And she had a piece of land in Georgia that
she’d inherited. I guess that’s gone now.
She’d given it to Eleanor and they put it up for
the bail.”

The machine whirred.

“Rigby wasn’t interested in anything that
generated their day-to-day income. He was always doing
his
Raven
thing. But she loved him. So he sat out in that shop and
made his books, and they just kept getting better and
better. After a while she thought they were better than
Grayson’s. One day Rigby went down to Tacoma to
look at some equipment in a printshop liquidation, and
Crystal brought Moon over to see the books. Moon
couldn’t believe his eyes. He thought Grayson had
come back to life, better than ever.

“The temptation to sell one was always with her
after that. She started hearing what people were
paying—all that money changing hands out there and
they had none of it. If she could just sell one, for
enough dough. She could hide the money and dribble it
into their account and they wouldn’t be so damn
hard up all the time. Rigby didn’t seem to notice
things like that. As long as there was food on the table
and a roof over their heads, he didn’t spend a lot
of time fretting. He didn’t care much about the
books either. He’d finish one and toss it back in
that room and never look at it again. Sometimes he talked
about destroying them, but he never did because Eleanor
loved them and he couldn’t stand to hurt her. But
all of them knew—Crystal, Moon, Eleanor—they
all knew that if he ever made one that satisfied him, the
others were all history.

“The temptation killed her. But she was afraid,
scared to death. If Rigby ever found out…well,
he’d never forgive her, would he?”

“If she was lucky.”

“Yeah, except she didn’t think of it that
way. She’d be betraying Grayson in his eyes and
that scared her silly. It came to a head about seven
years ago. They had a string of money problems all at
once and she started making some calls. Eventually she
got fun-neled to Murdock, who was then the leading
Grayson dealer in the country. The rest of it’s
pretty much like Scofield told it to you. When he had
that coughing attack, that’s what scared her off.
It dawned on her what an old man she was dealing with. If
Scofield should die and the book get out…well, that
would make news, wouldn’t it?”

“It would in the book world.”

“And there was a chance Rigby would hear about
it and go look and see the book was missing from that
back room.”

“Eleanor might even tell him. She’d read
it in
AB
, a new Grayson book found, and tear it out and show it
to him.”

He stopped the tape, ran it back slightly to the spot
he wanted, and leaned back in his chair.
“That’s when Pruitt came into it. When he
lost his job with Scofield, it was all downhill from
there. He thought if he could find this woman in red, he
could do two things—get back at Scofield and put
himself on easy street. But he figured wrong. He thought
it had to be one of Grayson’s old girlfriends, and
for most of a year he chased down that road, trying to
track ‘em all down.“

“What a job.”

“That’s what he found out. This Nola
Jean—he worked on her for months and came to the
same dead end everybody else came to. He went out and
interviewed the Rigbys one time, even went to Taos,
tracked down her sister, tried to talk to her. None of it
panned out. Finally he ran out of leads and had to give
it up. But he never stopped thinking about it.

“In the last five years, Pruitt really descended
to his natural level in the order of man. He was a cheap
hood, dreaming of glory. Then Eleanor got busted in New
Mexico. That was the catalyst, that’s what started
this new wave of stuff. There was a little article in one
of the Seattle papers, not much, just police-blotter
stuff. There wasn’t any what they call byline on
the story, it was just a long paragraph, Seattle woman
arrested in Taos heist and murder attempt, but your
friend Aandahl says she wrote it. Pruitt saw it. Suddenly
Grayson was back on the front burner again. The Rigby
girl had broken into the Jeffords woman’s house.
What could that mean? Maybe Jeffords had been
Scofield’s woman in red. The only thing Pruitt knew
for sure at that point was that Jeffords had had
something the Rigbys wanted, and he had a pretty fair
idea what that thing was. He called Slater and sent him
to New Mexico to watch Rigby. Then Pruitt went to North
Bend to confront Crystal, but she wouldn’t admit
anything. He harrassed her for a day or two, but that
didn’t get him anywhere. So he flew down to New
Mexico and turned up the heat on Eleanor. He stalked her,
called her at night with threats. He’d call at
midnight and hum that song. Anything to rattle her, to
get her to give up the book.”

“This was when she was out on bail.”

“Yeah, there was a period of about a week there
when Pruitt and Slater were hard on her case. She
didn’t have the book then but she knew where it
was. Charlie Jeffords had told her, it was Nola’s
book. So she went back and took it and made her run. The
funny thing is, she might not’ve done any of that
if the Jeffords woman had just talked to her.”

“All she wanted was to find her
mother.”

“So they get back up here and Pruitt starts in
on Crystal again. Stalking, calling. There were some
death threats. He’d call her at night and play that
song, just a snatch of it, just enough of it, just enough
of it. But loud, menacing. Then he started on Rigby too,
and that was his big mistake. He was messing with the
wrong dude. Rigby wound up at Pruitt’s house and
you know what happened after that. He ransacked the joint
and found the photocopies of Grayson’s
Raven
—that what you found burned in the wastebasket. I
figure Pruitt made that copy when he stole
Scofield’s book, years ago.

“There wasn’t even a misspelled word in
that one.”

“I’ll bet he didn’t even
look.”

He punched the tape. Crystal’s voice filled the
room.

“We stood around in shock,” she said,
faltering.

Quintana leaned back in his chair. “She’s
talking about the morning after the fire.”

“We were over at Archie’s shop, in
Snoqualmie,” she said. “We were like three
dead people. Gaston and Archie were beside themselves.
Gaston was inconsolable. It was the worst day of our
lives…until this one. I don’t think we said a
word to each other the whole time. What could be said?
Then we heard the door open…someone had come into
the shop. And I remember Archie yelling out that he was
closed… go away, just…go away. But the
footsteps came on, and then she was there. Nola. I kept
waiting for her to say something…maybe to cry. But
she looked at Gaston across the room…she looked
straight at him and said, mean as hell, ‘Cry if you
want to, suckers. I’m glad the son of a bitch is
dead.’“

Crystal sniffed and dabbed her eyes. “I knew she
didn’t mean that, it was just spite. She’d
had that awful fight with Darryl the day before…and
she’d always hated Gaston because she could never
move him the way she always got at other men. When she
said it, I felt sick. I turned away from her, I
couldn’t look at her…and then…then
there was this thump, or a kind of…crushing
sound…and when I turned around, she was lying there
with her brains…and Gaston stood over her with the
bloody hammer and Archie…Archie’d kinda
shrunk back to the wall and we all
just…just…”

Her face was pale. She looked faint.

Quintana’s voice came in. “Take your time,
Mrs. Rigby. Would you like some water?”

“No.”

But she took the glass he handed her and gulped
it.

“Then what happened?”

“Archie said…something
like…it’s a good thing you did that or I
woulda. But that was just talk, it was Gaston who’d
done it. And he’d sat down and there was no concern
or…anything…on his face…and somebody
mentioned the police. And I said no…can’t
call them, they’ll lock him up and what would I do
without him? He was my life, how would I live? So we
rolled her in a rug and that night Archie and I took her
off in the truck and we buried her.”

Off camera, Quintana said, “What about the other
people he killed?”

“I don’t know.” She began to cry
again.

“Should we believe that, Mrs. Rigby?”

“I don’t care what you believe. My life is
over.”

Quintana snapped off the machine and rewound the tape.
Neither of us spoke until it clicked.

“Did she know Rigby had taken
Eleanor?”

“I don’t think so. She says no. I believe
her.” He put the cassette away and pushed himself
back from the desk. “I found out a few more things
while you were out playing the Lone Ranger. It was Rigby
who made that call at four o’clock in the morning.
He called the cops on his own kid. I think he was afraid
of himself, what he might do if it turned out that
Eleanor really had that flawed book. Hell, he was right
to be afraid, he’d killed everybody else who ever
had one. He tried to hide his voice, but I’ve got
the tape and it was him. He was on long enough for the
number to get logged, so we know the call came from that
phone. I think he turned on the record at Pruitt’s
for the same reason. There was a part of him that wanted
us to catch him.”

I thought of Crystal and Archie and asked what he
thought would happen to them now.

“Whatever it is, it won’t be anything
compared to what they’ve already been through.
We’ll see if the facts bear out her story. I doubt
if they’ll do any jail time; the only charge would
be rendering criminal assistance, and the statute’s
probably run on that. They don’t seem to care right
now. They waived their rights to a lawyer, gave us
statements of their own free will, and the statements
jibed and I believe ‘em.”